


A Game of Theft

by susuvvatari



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen, Heroin, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-09-16 13:11:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16954671
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/susuvvatari/pseuds/susuvvatari
Summary: Corey Tillmann is a thief, specialising in historical artefacts. He's never shied away from a challenge, but he might have just bitten off more than he can chew. There's no honour among thieves, after all.





	1. The Frozen Men

* * *

“Looters become looted, while time and tide make us mercenaries all.” 

― Patrick Rothfuss,  _The Wise Man's Fear_

* * *

 

 He was searching for people. He pulled bodies out of icy water and dressed them in warm clothes, combed their hair and sat them up in leather armchairs around a fire. He placed warm mugs of cocoa in their cold hands and watched the ice melt from their hair. It always ended the same. Just as it seemed the frozen men might open their eyes, there was a sound like ice cracking, and metal hitting metal, and Corey would wake up. In the dream, he wasn’t frightened. But when he woke up, he felt afraid. That was what made it worse – knowing that the fear would come later. He would go to sleep and wish not to see it all over again, and like clockwork he would dream of the frozen men, and in the morning he woke up afraid of how calmly his dream self had dealt with this horror. Every morning, he would remember how cold the men had felt, and how he had manipulated their frozen limbs into coats with fur collars. The ice covered them like crystals, sitting delicately on their eyelashes, and their fingers were black.

There was something about the detail of the dream that unnerved him. Even as a child, he knew that dreams weren’t real, and Corey knew that there were far more frightening things in the world than dreams. But it was unlike any dream or nightmare he had before or since. Everything else was usual fare: running from an unseen monster, waking with a vague sense of dread. But the bodies in the water, they were different. They _felt_ real. 

Corey hadn’t really thought of his dreams in nearly twenty years. He had no occasion to, until he decided his last job. At twenty-four, Corey was a disenchanted member of the generation berated by their elders for lacking opportunity. Opportunity was no longer running through the streets from a wellspring, but Corey wondered if it ever had in his hometown of Hastings. _1066 country,_ his teachers used to say. He grinned wryly at that. It suited the place, with its peeling paint shop fronts and sad, empty pubs, to be hanging onto the legacy of a thousand year old battle they didn’t even win. He grew up in a council estate house with his dad and his succession of useless girlfriends, each one a parody of the other. His dad was probably still there, crashing in the house between stints in the local, crowing the same old story to the same old crowd of losers and drunks who sit in a Wetherspoons on a Tuesday lunchtime.

Corey knew early on that that wasn’t the life for him. He had ambition. Privately, he respected his mum for leaving and never looking back. It was just a shame she hadn’t thought it worthwhile to take her only child with her. When he was younger, of course, he agreed with his dad. He called his mum a bitch and said he was better off without her. But now, with the clarity brought by age, he saw through his dad’s bluster. There was no reason for any woman to stay with an unemployed scrounger who lived on former glories.

So Corey had left. After he finished school at sixteen, he packed a bag and caught a coach to London. It didn’t matter that he had nowhere to go. He’d spent his Saturdays picking pockets in town and he was good at it. And there were plenty of pickings in central London. Businessmen too busy to notice—or too rich to care about—a wallet slipping out of their pocket. Corey was decent enough, but the combination of being starving, cold, and desperate to make enough money to find shelter for the night, forced him to improve. He couldn’t afford being caught.

On the streets, there’s always a family to teach you whatever you need. Moving up the rungs from petty theft to shoplifting was easy. And the more Corey did, the more people he met. People who would buy lifted goods without asking questions. People who worked in teams and split their profit. Corey thought of himself as an outlaw, outside of society **.** Or anyway, that's what he told himself—that what he was doing on a small scale was no different than what governments and museums did on a larger one.

Of course, there’s only so far a person can go in any given career before they feel the need to move onto greener pastures. And so, Corey found himself dealing in black market artefacts. Or, to be exact, _stealing_ them, and selling them on the dark web. People would pay more than his year’s rent for an ancient bangle or some such relic. Personally, Corey didn’t see the appeal. He’d rather be decked out in the latest garms than wearing something someone probably died wearing.

The morning that everything changed, Corey woke up to the sound of Google alerts. Bleary eyed, he sat up in bed and unlocked his phone, scanning whatever article it was that had set it off. Through the haze of early morning tiredness, he only took in a few words: _rare_ , _historical importance, exhibition._

He set his phone down and stretched in bed. Whatever it was, he aimed to take it. Rare items always fetched a good price, no matter how small or seemingly inconsequential. However, the rarer the item, the riskier the job— and it took watertight planning to pull off a job inside a museum _._ Not impossible, but close enough that most people looked for an easier target. Corey, however, had never been put off by a challenge. In fact, he needed something complex to really get his teeth into. He’d been vegetating in his room for days, eating pizza out the box and scrolling mindlessly through forums online.

He brewed himself a coffee and took a shower before he sat at his desk and returned to the article. He studied it closely this time, caffeinated and alert. It was about a recently discovered fragment of a clay pipe from _HMS Terror_ , one of the ships lost during Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition to the Arctic. So little was known about what happened to the men who died that any Franklin artefacts were valuable. People loved knowing secrets, feeling as though they understood something more about a mystery than the common public. That was something Corey traded on. As he researched, Corey found himself drawn into the narrative. He had a trader’s instinct for a good story to sell his merchandise. If he was made of weaker stuff, he might have shivered as he read about the evidence of cannibalism among the crew.

As it was, he read on.

The aforementioned clay pipe had been engraved with two tiny letters: C.H. The article had a quote from some egghead (for whom this was probably the highest point in their life) talking about how it was _highly likely_ that the pipe belonged to the same Cornelius Hickey whose knife had been found in 1855. Corey raised his eyebrows. _Poor bastard,_ he thought, _living your whole life with a name like Cornelius only to go and choke it up in the Arctic_. Keeping the article open in one tab, he opened another, searching for information about the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. As far as he knew, no one had tried to lift anything from there in the past. But then again, there wasn’t a big market for scraps of sail material and the broken remains of out-dated naval technology. When people wanted artefacts, they wanted something impressive; they wanted something they could show off to their friends at dinner parties. It always made him laugh, because it obviously wasn’t law-abiding citizens buying the stuff he procured. He imagined some Pablo Escobar wannabe leading his cronies through halls that looked like museum rooms, on their way to sniff lines at an absurdly expensive table made of ebony, or something. 

 _Cornelius Hickey_. Corey mused on the name as he researched. It was certainly recognisable. Unforgettable, even. He wondered why the bloke would carve his name into everything. Was he afraid it would get stolen? Was he was just narcissistic, carving his name everywhere like a teenage boy would on school desks? _Cornelius woz here_ , etc. 

It didn’t really matter. That was the truth Corey built his life on – nothing really mattered. There was no moral imperative to anything, certainly nothing substantial or significant that had ever impeded him. He stole for a living, and so far he had gotten away with it for eight years. He brewed another cup of coffee and wondered whether he should look to see if there was any interest already. It was hard to tell with some things. Sometimes, speciality items wouldn’t garner any interest until after he posted looking for a sale. Weighing his options, Corey decided to wait. He wasn’t the only one working the scene, and he didn’t want any competitors getting wind of his plans. He’d missed a few targets in the past by being too friendly with his colleagues. As the old saying goes: there’s no honour among thieves. 

He spent all day researching the museum and the history of the artefact. In Corey’s line of business, it was important to know the worth of what you were selling. Too many people would resell your stock, or make offers well below an item’s worth. He’d been caught out in the early days by that, though he was older and wiser now, and he’d learnt the value in keeping your cards close to your chest.

By the evening, with the setting Sun glinting off the Thames, Corey leant back in his chair confident in his knowledge. If he could pull this off, he would make enough not to work another job that year. He felt the strange wave of calm roll over him like mist rolling across fields, the same feeling of calm whenever he started a job that really caught his interest. He glanced at the time on his computer. 2AM. He hadn’t even noticed the time passing. He dragged his body to bed and laid down, certain that he would sleep well that night after working so hard all day. 

But that night, for the first time in twenty years, Corey dreamed of the frozen men.


	2. Hell is Alone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning: implied abortion in this chapter.

 

* * *

 “From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale.”   
― Richard Siken, _Detail of the Woods_

* * *

 It was cold. It was cold and it was empty. Devoid of sound or sight, the only sensation was a disembodied, surrounding chill. There was nobody else here. He had once thought Heaven a kind of Hell if the dead could not leave: now he knew the truth was that there was neither Heaven nor Hell. There was just emptiness, and silence, and himself. Time had no meaning. Nothing had any meaning. In that sense, for Cornelius Hickey being dead was just like being alive. Meaning was derived from a man’s perceptions, not from any inherent moral value. Knowing that rendered meaning as true as a shadow on a wall.

What really mattered was what a man made of himself, and all his life, Cornelius Hickey had tried to find a way to better himself. He’d only joined Franklin’s cursed expedition to get to the Sandwich Islands. He had dreamed of a life where the Sun warmed his skin, instead of the smog choking his lungs in the cities of England. The man who would use the name Hickey was born a bastard that only a mother could want. He had seen the worst of human cruelty in the dark backstreets of Manchester, and learnt that the only meaning in any man’s life is one he makes for himself. Hickey knew that a streak of individualistic determination would have been fêted in a man from the right background, and he was acutely aware of how it was despised in a man like him. 

 _Eternity is longer than you can imagine,_ a preacher had scolded him, _it is thrice what you think and even longer still._ How Hickey would like to see him now. He would crow how he had survived the barren wastelands of the afterlife and it had changed nothing. It hadn’t mattered that he never attended a Sunday service in his life. It hadn’t mattered that he begged and stole, that he cursed, that he lied. It hadn’t even mattered that he murdered. Hickey had a sense that this nothingness was not a personal punishment, but a state of being. And a man could adapt to a state of being. It required a single-mindedness that few could muster, but it was possible. He had proved it. From the slums slick with mud and blood, through the Arctic and to the limitless hereafter, Hickey drew on his skill for survival. He drew on his ability to shift. A situation only lacked opportunity if you weren’t looking at it the right way. He didn’t care that it made men hate him. A dead man’s hatred meant nothing – as long as you were still breathing. And therein was the problem.

When he was a boy, he had heard about one of the girls in the slums running séances. Rumours moved through the slums like fog. She was called Peggy or Polly or some such. He remembered how she wore white cotton dresses and tied her hair with ivory ribbons, paid for by those who believed she would lift the veil to the afterlife. Her family was large and poor, too many mouths to feed on too little pay. He knew her father spent his pay in the local and her mother spent nights on the street corner. He supposed it was a kind of blessing, when the séances brought in money. But nothing came for free in this world. The story went that she used to sell flowers up at the markets but had fallen into some trouble with a butcher’s boy. The boy, being trained in anatomy to a certain degree, promised her he could solve the problem. She came home with blood between her legs and she left half her mind in a squalid back alley. But now, they said, it meant she could speak to the dead. 

Rich men and women came in their carriages to crouch around her little table and play heathen, contacting the dead. Hickey had no religious qualms about it. Truthfully, he had no religion to speak of. But he had always wondered if it was true: that someone could conjure spirits that had departed this world, entice them back and ask them questions. He wondered what the spirits would have to say for themselves, too. Her watery blue eyes seemed to stare past everything to some distant point, sliding off to the side like she was following something. The men down the pub said it was a con, that her family threw their voices and scrabbled against the walls, used the lights and a mirror to distract their visitors while they picked pockets. They said that it was a shame about what happened, but only women and children believed a barren woman could speak to the dead. Perhaps, it was all a con. But perhaps she saw spectres, too. Hickey knew that two seemingly opposing things could still be both be true. Regardless, the memory led to a thought, and as with all things, the thought lead to a plan. 

He had been mulling it over. He resented death. He had it all planned out. If the creature had just accepted him, he could have survived in the Arctic. It wasn’t the life he had dreamed of, but it was clear that none of them would return home. So he had adapted, decided that he would make the godforsaken tundra his home. He had the will to survive. Men like Hodgson would bow under pressure, but Hickey was made of sterner stuff. If it had gone as he had planned, he might have found his way to the Sandwich Islands anyway. But it hadn’t. He was dead, stuck in an empty plane. At twenty-four, he thought he deserved more time than he had been given. Maybe he would have had it if the officers hadn’t blundered around lying to everyone to preserve rank. But what was done was done. What concerned him now was the future. The question he ruminated on was a question of escape. How would he escape nothingness? He deserved the time that was stolen from him. And nothing stood in the way of Cornelius Hickey.


	3. Redirection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger Warning: referenced drug use in this chapter.

* * *

"Your body told me in a dream it’s never been afraid of anything."  
\- Richard Siken, _Detail of the Woods_

* * *

 

 Lying on the sofa, Corey grinned and drank deeply from a nearly empty beer bottle. The lights were dimmed, a roach sat in the ashtray on the coffee table. The risk paid off. He couldn’t believe it. It had taken weeks of planning. He’d only had one visit to scout the place accurately. He was almost certain he’d be caught: he had an unusual sense of dread that had taken effort to shake off. He wasn’t green by any stretch of the imagination, but this was of a higher profile than he usually chose. He preferred simple, easy jobs. Certainly not anything close to home. But this was what he had chosen, and if he had any reservations, he shook them off. When it came down to it, Corey got the job done. That was the thing he’d learnt: the most important thing wasn’t how you managed something, but the simple fact that you did. In his line of business, questions were limited and unnecessary.

Most days, Corey moved through everything with a sense of detachment. He had to be on his guard against competitors, undercover coppers, and international agencies. He didn’t see people, he didn’t go out unless he needed to for work. He knew other guys in the field who drank and took drugs, who went to parties with their clients. Corey had a plug, he smoked up, but he didn’t want to draw attention. He’d never exactly been an extrovert. He was happy sitting at home playing FIFA, eating takeaway, and occasionally wanking off. But this job, this particular item and the history, drew him in. He already knew he was in too deep, thinking about the item as more than just a cash cow. Corey had always worked successfully because he had rules. He didn’t need to know anything about a target beyond where it was and how much it was worth. But this item, this job… He’d studied more about the Franklin expedition than his History GCSE, and still, he turned it over in his mind.

In the background, the television was playing a film. _“… You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, "as greedy as a pig_ ". But Corey wasn’t paying attention. All his thoughts were focused on the clay pipe. Someone held that pipe, used it to smoke every day probably. Cornelius Hickey, whoever he was, had left his mark on it. From the reading he’d done, Corey knew that Cornelius died aged twenty-four – the same age he was, now. He couldn’t imagine signing up to an expedition, knowing he might die somewhere, starving and cold. He couldn’t imagine dying for anything.

This was against the rules. This was so extremely against the rules he had set. Corey only followed his own code, and he wasn’t even doing that. The clay pipe in question sat in a plastic bag on the kitchen counter, waiting for him to post about it on forums and send it off to the highest bidder. It would be nothing, to get up and take it out the bag, to hold it in his hands and feel the weight of it. He’d already disregarded one rule: why bother with any of the others? 

“In for a penny, in for a pound.” He murmured to himself.

It was smaller than Corey expected, but the _C.H._ carved into the side was unmistakable. He ran his fingers over the grooves, felt the uneven lines of the letters. He thought if he held it, he might have some rush of compassion for the dead man whose belongings he’d stolen. He felt nothing. It was just a pipe. He didn’t know what he really expected – some kind of psychic vision? That made him roll his eyes. He didn’t believe in anything like that. He had an arrangement with a girl once who kept crystals on her windowsill and told him he was a typical Gemini. He feigned interest when he had to, but he never took it in. He couldn’t even remember her name, come to think of it. But he did remember the gift she got him one Christmas: some kind of spirit board, thrown into the back of his wardrobe, probably hidden under shoeboxes by now.

He hadn’t thought about it in years, not since she first gave it to him. He had no idea why it should enter his thoughts now. Looking back at the pipe, he held it up to the glow of the lamp light. It was a kind of off-white, with burnt marks around the rim where he supposed the tobacco ought to go. He wasn’t stupid enough to try and smoke from it – he needed to sell it. He was just satisfying his curiosity. He told himself he was doing it so he had a better understanding of how to market the thing.

The television was still flickering, credits music playing. He poked the mute button, silencing it.

“Cornelius Hickey.” He said the name aloud, to his empty flat.

It was such a weird name. It sounded clunky when he said it, the sounds hitting against one another harshly. _Cornelius_ was so pompous, but _Hickey_ sounded like a joke. It was like a name from a Monty Python film.

“Your mates ever call you Corny?”

As he spoke, he turned the pipe over in his hands, rolling it back and forth between his fingers and his palms. They said there was a knife found with his name on it too. 

“What else have you carved your name into? Cornelius Hickey. They found your knife, they found your pipe. But they didn’t find you. Because your mates ate you?”

Cannibalism. Every source mentioned it. Bones boiled up and cracked open to access the marrow.

“Corny Cornelius. Corn on the hob.”

_That’s not very nice._

Corey’s thoughts didn’t usually answer him back. Spooky. Pocketing the pipe, he stood up and looked around his flat. It was ex-council, open plan but small and messy. A pizza box was strewn across the floor. He'd have to sort that out in the morning. Suddenly, he felt tired.  _Not_ , he told himself,  _because that freaked me out_. _Just need to sleep._

Corey took another swig from the beer bottle.

“Hey, Cornelius. What does human taste like?”

 _You tell me_. 

That made Corey shiver like cold water was trickling down his spine. He felt uneasy. His mind darted to the pipe. But he wasn’t about to call a pipe haunted. That was ridiculous. He glanced at the roach on the table, wondering if he’d been given the wrong order. Some weird paranoid strain the students want, probably. He was tired. He'd already decided he needed sleep and this was just proof of his sleep-deprived mind begging him to turn in for the night. He was thinking weird shit but after a good sleep it would be back to normal. 

He wrapped the pipe back up in the plastic bag and carried it into his room. He had a safe in here, in the storage space under his bed. It was where he kept goods until he could send them. _The pipe can stay here_ , he thought. _That’s what you get for messing about late at night when you're high._ As far as he was concerned, he’d drunk too much and smoked something dodgy. There was no reason to connect a couple of weird thoughts to anything other than that. This was why he didn’t read about the history of items, or handle them after he had acquired them. He had always had an over-active imagination as a child. His father had told him he was gifted, probably to fuel his own ego. That was the kind of claim Corey’s dad would love to make down the local: his son was gifted, headed to Oxford. Maybe that was part of the reason Corey decided not to get trapped in academia. Anyway, he was an adult now. His father’s drunken ramblings and his childhood games weren’t important. Even his mind playing tricks on him wasn't important. What was important was that he didn’t believe in ghosts, because they weren't real.

“Ghosts don’t exist.” He said to himself.

There was no reply.


	4. The Nightmare Evolves

* * *

 "I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul." _  
_ \- Bram Stoker, _Dracula_   

* * *

 It happened again. Black water glowed red by the light of a setting Sun, and his echoing footsteps crunched on white stones that dug into the soles of his feet. The water was shallow, and cold. Bodies floated face down, gently rocked back and forth by the waves. He had to get to them; he had to pull them out. There were so many, but he worked like a man possessed. He dragged them from the water into a cabin, pulled their sodden clothes from their bodies. The wet wool was heavy and difficult to manoeuvre, but he tugged and ripped until there was a pile in the corner. He dressed the men in warm clothes of a style he didn’t recognise, with brown fur collars and heavy brass buttons. He forced their bodies into armchairs. He combed their hair of tangles and tucked the curls behind their ears. So many of them had gently curling hair. But their heads fell to their shoulders at unnatural angles, and mussed their hair, which he had so carefully styled. He thought the way their heads lolled ought to make him feel uneasy, but noted that he didn’t.

The fire crackled as he brewed cocoa. The mugs were like the old camping ones he used to see at the back of the cupboard at his Dad’s house. Steam spiralled up from the painted rims. He had planned to put marshmallows in the cocoa, but he remembered the way the bodies had bobbed in the waves, and thought better of it. The mugs lined the counter, and one by one he placed a mug in the cold hands of the frozen men. He folded their black fingers around the mugs, one by one, and looked into their faces. They looked peaceful, like they slept. All of them had ice nestled into their eyelashes and their hair. Sitting by the fire, he watched them. The ice was beginning to melt and run in rivulets down their faces like tears. It reminded him of statues of Mary that were said to cry on holy days, the way they sat so still and yet looked like they cried. Time seemed to move slowly; if there had been a clock, he expected to see the seconds tick by like hours. Still, the men sat there. The air in the room shifted as he breathed. There was a feeling like anticipation that he couldn’t name. Still, the cocoa steamed. He looked at their cold, white skin in the low glow of the fire. He couldn’t break the silence. He was waiting for something to happen. Still, the ice melted.

He stared at their closed eyes, and wet eyelashes. He felt as though at any moment, their eyes would fly open as though all the men would wake up from the same nightmare at the same time. He couldn’t explain how he knew this, but it was like the knowledge had always sat in his brain, waiting for the moment to reveal itself. It was like déjà vu. There was a sudden noise, a rumbling crack that was louder than thunder. It reverberated into his bones. The cocoa in the mugs slopped over the side like a great force had pushed them all. When the noise ceased, he stood and walked towards the cabin door. He thought that an ice shelf had collapsed, or a crack had run across some frozen lake – but there was no ice shelf or frozen lake nearby. There was only the black water, stretching out to the end of the horizon, and surrounding them on all sides. As he faced the door, he saw the handle shake.

 _This is new_ , he thought. 

He walked closer to the door, suddenly aware of the muffled sound of his bare feet on the wooden floor. He turned back to the frozen men. Their eyes remained shut. The melted ice was pooling on the floor in shallow puddles. They hadn’t moved, but he felt as though they were watching him. He had nothing else to offer them than this. This was all he could do: pull them out, clothe them, give them cocoa. Sit with them in companionable silence. He didn’t know what they wanted from him now. _This is wrong,_ he thought. He never left the frozen men. He never walked towards the door. There was never anyone else except the bodies. There was never another person, rattling the door.

But the handle shook again, and he turned to watch the door. He felt disconcerted. There shouldn’t be any one else here. The handle turned left, then right. Someone was out there, and they wanted to get in. He couldn’t explain why, but he knew that he couldn’t open the door. He knew that he _shouldn’t_ open the door. He knew that there was nothing good out there in the emptiness from which he had rescued these frozen bodies. The handle was still, now, but he couldn’t move from the spot. He stood in front of the door. If he stretched out his hand, he could grip the handle.

Then, the noise. It seemed to come from all angles, from above them and below them, surrounding the cabin. It was deafening. The sound of metal hitting metal, a sharp edge hitting something blunt. It rang in his ears until he felt dizzy. He turned to look at the men but his eyes weren’t focusing. It was like looking at the world from the bottom of a pool, with the light all dappled. Their faces looked strange and twisted, no longer in peaceful sleep. Perhaps they could hear the noise too. He couldn’t bear it. He opened his mouth to scream, but he couldn’t hear his own voice over the ringing of metal.

 

* * *

 

Corey woke in a cold sweat.

The nightmare had been unchanged since he could remember having it. There was never anything beyond the frozen men, the fire and the cocoa, and the noise. It was only when he woke that he would find the nightmare so disturbing; while he was asleep he felt at peace. But now, he lay awake in cold, damp sheets and felt his heart pounding still. He wiped his eyes, suddenly aware of the wetness on his cheeks. _It’s just sweat_ , he told himself. No grown man cried because of a nightmare. He got out of bed and pulled the sheets back to air, turning on the lights as he moved from bedroom to bathroom. He needed to shower, brush his teeth. He needed a coffee. 

In the bathroom mirror, Corey pulled at his eyes and ran his fingers through his hair. He bared his teeth at his own reflection. His mouth felt dry and disgusting. What he needed to do was get on with work. He remembered the strangeness of the night before as he brushed his teeth. That probably explained his dream; left over paranoia from a bad strain, he decided. He wasn’t about to give undue significance to a childhood nightmare. He had more pressing matters – the pipe to sell on as quickly as possible. 

The clock was already ticking on that. It was a high-risk item, one that would be watched by who knows how many agencies. He didn’t want it sitting around in his flat for any longer than was strictly necessary. If he was being honest, he didn’t want it in his flat at all. His mind kept drifting to the way the articles had described how Franklin’s crew had descended into cannibalism. He thought about Cornelius Hickey. How could you eat the bodies of men you knew? Did the men think they would get home and never have to explain where half the crew was? As he thought, Corey ran the shower. The water needed a minute or two to warm up. He stripped and glanced in the mirror. 

"What happened to you, Hickey?"

Something moved behind his shoulder.

 _Eat or be eaten._  

It was only when he opened his eyes again and felt the cold tiles against his skin that Corey realised he collapsed.


	5. The Thief's Progress

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See endnotes for information about this chapter.

* * *

"You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.”   
― Jean Genet,  _The Thief's Journal_

* * *

 

He had been so many people. 

His mother had called him Edwin, for his father. He hated it. His father was long gone by the time he made his way into the world and he resented another man’s shadow hanging over him like the shadow of a noose. He remembered his mother with kindness, though. She had clear skin and large hazel eyes that looked out under the world from strong, arched brows. She was beautiful, and he looked nothing like her. He was small, his hair some washed out shade between blonde and auburn, his features sharp. _Your father’s look_ , she would say sweetly, pushing strands of hair out of his eyes and tapping him on his nose. Even though they lived in a lodging room in a building full of other poor families, his mother had always told him that they were _special_. They were different to the others. When she smiled at him and winked, he believed her stories that their ancestors were kings in a distant land. But here, they were poor. And his mother had no talent but her beauty.

He and his siblings were a motley lot. He knew it was because none of them shared more than their mother’s blood – they were all the children of strangers who had visited for a night. As the oldest, his mother told him he had to look out for the others. He had two brothers, and three sisters. Other babies had been born and died in the night, or been born dead, or been lost before they could even be born. He struggled to think of any time in his childhood that his mother had not been pregnant. He had tried to look after his brothers and sisters, but in truth he had always resented them. He and his mother had so little, and for each new sibling born, more would have to be divided up. _One day_ , he told his mother, _there will be so many of us that we will have to divide the blanket up and it will be in pieces so small we can’t even see it._ She had laughed at him, and he hated how the sound of her laughter made him laugh and forget his worries.

She was beautiful, and good, and he loved her. She had been beautiful as cholera had spread through the slums and taken her with it. The fever made her eyes bright. Her dark hair shone blue-black in contrast with her pale skin slowly turning blue. She never looked gaunt; her cheekbones made her look like some kind of fairy queen. He was ten years old, then. He saw so many people die from that awful sickness. The stench of it was inescapable. He couldn’t stay. Edwin promised his mother he would find work and pay for a doctor to come to her and his siblings. He kissed her forehead and he left. He was smart enough to know that one less mouth to feed would improve their chances, and young enough to believe that he could make enough money in the city centre to keep his promise. In the end, the will to live won out against his filial duty.

He learned quickly that there was no work for a boy with his surname. His mother had given him her own surname but it was a legacy that served him poorly. Everywhere he went they called him a thief and threw him back out to the gutters. They didn’t want him for a shop boy, they didn’t want him to apprentice, they didn’t want him as a chimney sweep. He had gone to the city looking for honest work but he had been sent away. When he was older, he looked back on this time and pinpointed it as the moment the seed of resentment had been sown. He begged entrance into society beyond the slums he was born into, and they had refused him. Society rejected him and called him a thief so thief he had become. He was the monster of their own making.

He knew boys who ran the streets with stolen names: Tom Day, Harry May, Billy Wild. They were always looking for fresh blood to join their gang. They welcomed him into the place they called home, they fed him and gave him a new neckerchief to wear. _We look after our own_ , they said. Edwin looked up to all of them, then, but Tom most of all. Tom was tall for fourteen, with broad shoulders and a wicked look in his bright blue eyes. He could look older or younger for his age, if he wanted. It all depended on how he held himself. He had the beginnings of stubble by his jaw, and Edwin thought he looked like the hero from a story. Edwin was eager for praise and eager to please, and Tom had taken him under his wing as much for his own vanity as for Edwin’s criminal advancement.

Every day they went out to steal, and every night they tried their luck in pubs. They told him he wasn’t to come on their evenings out until he had contributed to the gang, and he couldn’t contribute to the gang until he could pick a pocket without disturbing the bell tied to the prize. It was an old trick to train a thief: if you could remove a wallet or a purse without making the bell ring, it stood to reason you could remove the same without alerting the owner of the item.

It took Edwin twelve weeks to perfect the art.

He was so pleased when he managed it, repeating the act again and again to the older boys. 

“I’ll go out with you tomorrow,” he had announced. 

“Before you ever gets your fingers close to a real coat pocket, you’ve got to know the name you’ll be giving the blowers if you get caught.” Tom had told him. 

“Isn’t the point not to get caught?” 

Tom had laughed and clapped him on his skinny shoulder at that.

He wanted to run with the others, and go out at night. He wanted to be at the centre of it all. And so, he decided he needed a new name _. Nothing extravagant_ , Tom had said. _Nothing attention-seeking._ He sat in the flashhouse and pondered it while the older boys tried to convince ladybirds to share a bottle of gin. He wanted a first name similar to his own so it would be easy to remember. A surname was harder to settle on. _Baxtalo_ , his mother had called him. It hadn’t been long ago, but it felt like a lifetime away. The word meant ‘lucky’ in the language of his mother’s people. That language had sent him down this road; he felt it was only right to use it in his small act of revenge. The name came to him as though he had always known it: _Edward Baxter_. He had learnt how to steal with fingers lighter than feathers, and how to lie as quickly as thinking, and now he had a name. His transformation into a dipper was complete.

The day the boys took him out for the first time, it was his twelfth birthday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> E.C.'s mother dies of cholera; Manchester was hit badly by the cholera epidemic of 1831–32. Cholera causes the skin to turn blueish as dehydration sets in.
> 
> A flashhouse was a safe haven where criminals could sell stolen goods and where those new to the streets could learn how to be a criminal. 
> 
> A ladybird was Victorian criminal slang for a prostitute.
> 
> Blower was Victorian criminal slang for police.
> 
> 'Baxtalo' is Romani for lucky. I have written E.C. as having mixed Romani heritage.
> 
> A dipper was Victorian criminal slang for a pickpocket.


	6. Take Your Life Back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for a mention of heroin in this chapter.

* * *

“Death is so terribly final, while life is full of possibilities.”  
\- George R. R. Martin,  _A Game of Thrones_

* * *

 

Corey sniffed. He wasn’t feeling well. It had been three days since he had collapsed in his bathroom, and he felt on edge. Every night, he slept fitfully. He was afraid that his nightmare would reappear, and shift as it had before. He was afraid of what else may be altered in his dream world. He refused to give legitimacy to his dreams, he knew they had no bearing of reality, but he couldn’t shake off the feeling of dread and fear. It clung to him like the smell of smoke. Before, he had always been unnerved by the _realism_ of the dream. The intense detail that he could vividly recall without even trying made him feel unsettled. But this felt more like paranoia. He only lay down to sleep when he was forced to through sheer exhaustion, and even then he resisted rest. He was desperate enough to pray to a God he didn’t even believe in. _Please, don’t let the dream come. Let me sleep without dreams. Don’t make me go through it again._

After he woke up on the bathroom floor, he started to feel a burning pain between his shoulders like he’d spent hours hunched over the Playstation. It didn’t go when he took ibuprofen, aspirin, or paracetamol. He was alternating between fevers and chills, and the thought of food made his stomach turn. Whatever he’d caught, it was dragging him down. _The only silver lining,_ he told himself, _was that at least now_ _t_ _he_ _re_ _was_ _an explanation for the weird things happening._ The mind did strange things when you weren’t well. He knew a guy who used to sleepwalk whenever he had a cold. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that the voice he had heard was just his own subconscious, and he had simply mistaken it for something more because he was run down. The nightmares were just a result of his body fighting off a cold. There was no hidden meaning in it, just a series of coincidences. That the dream had changed after following the same course for twenty years, Corey contributed to being unwell. There was no other logical explanation.

He wandered the pharmacy looking for the strongest cold cure he could find. Corey refused to be sick, he refused to be at the mercy of his body playing up. He picked up Day Nurse and Night Nurse, Vitamin C capsules, Honey and Lemon drink sachets, Fishermans Friend throat lozenges. He just needed to take a break and look after himself. It had been days since he had collapsed and every day he felt worse. He tried to work through it, but the light from the laptop screen made the pain behind his eyes worse until he thought he might vomit. There was no point trying to deal with the clay pipe while he was like this; it was the perfect storm for making a mistake. And a mistake in his line of work could be catastrophic.

Unfortunately, that meant the item had stayed in his flat for nearly two weeks now.

The pharmacist looked at him with slightly narrowed eyes when he dumped his pile on the counter. She was pretty, with shiny dark hair tied up in a high ponytail. If he was feeling better, he might have tried to chat her up.

“Feeling under the weather?”

He gave her a look that he hoped communicated his utter contempt. Suddenly, he liked her a lot less. The circles under his eyes were dark purple, his hair was sticking up in odd directions, and his shoulders were hunched up towards his ears. He’d always been slim, but the exhaustion had shaved a few pounds from him and he was starting to look gaunt. It was obvious he was feeling _under the weather._

“Just these please,” he muttered, fishing a twenty pound note out of his pocket.

“That will be £17.89 – Oh, hang on. One of these boxes has been opened. Let me get you a new one from the back. Two minutes.”

Corey frowned. He was poorly but he wasn’t completely out of it. He would have noticed an opened box in his hoard of cold remedies. He opened his mouth to say something but the pharmacist had disappeared behind a door marked ‘Staff Only’. Maybe he wasn’t as alert as he had thought. He hadn’t been sleeping properly, three or four hours at best, and even then he woke up every hour between. He rubbed a hand over his face, trying to wake himself up. His eyes were starting to burn. He’d never felt like this, he’d always been fit. He could have been captain of the football team at school and he still sometimes played five-a-side games on a Sunday morning with his mates. He never caught seasonal flus. He didn’t think of himself as the kind of person who caught a bug and stopped functioning because of it.

When she returned, the pharmacist had a little paper bag with the shop name stamped on it. She swept the other boxes into the bag and set it on the counter.

“That’s everything then?” She prompted him.

“What? Oh, yeah.” He pushed the crumpled note across the counter to her.

As she dropped a two pound coin, ten pence, and a copper penny into his hand, she gave him a strange look.

“Good luck,” she said quietly.

When he got back to his flat, Corey emptied out the pharmacy bag and the boxes of medicine clattered onto his countertop. He scrunched up the bag but he could feel something still inside, resisting as he tried to screw the paper up into a ball. Looking in the bag, he saw a thin leaflet. He hadn’t picked that up, or asked for any extra information. _Maybe it was just something to do with seasonal illnesses_ , he thought. He pulled it out and dropped the bag on the counter with the boxes.

 

HEROIN TAKES LIVES. TAKE YOURS BACK… TODAY!

 

He rolled his eyes and dumped the leaflet in the bin. He made his way to his bathroom and stared at his reflection. In fairness to the pharmacist, he could see why she had slipped the leaflet in with his stuff. He looked like shit. His own eyes stared back at him, and the man in the reflection looked exhausted and empty. He splashed cold water on his face and watched as it dripped down his chin onto his teeshirt. For a moment, he felt like he was back in the dream cabin, watching ice melt and run down the faces of the frozen men. It made his heart pound in shock. He turned off the light in the bathroom and returned to the living room. He poured out a glass of water and swallowed down two Day Nurse capsules.

He couldn’t keep wasting time with illness. It was draining him. He had a life to lead, things to do.

“This is getting ridiculous,” he said out loud. His voice sounded petulant, even to him.

_I agree._

There it was again, that voice. He hadn’t heard it since he fainted in the bathroom.

“Fuck off,” he growled.

_To where do you suggest?_

Corey tried to focus on the voice. He had a feeling it was male, but he couldn’t explain why. And now he was hearing it again, he was certain it wasn’t his own subconscious. _But then_ , he supposed, _hallucinations don’t seem like hallucinations_. He lay down on the sofa and flicked the television on to _Eastenders,_ letting the soap opera play on a barely audible volume. He was determined that this nonsense would be finished in a few days. He would take all the stuff he’d brought and he would get better and he would _sell the clay pipe_. The fact that it was still in the flat made him uneasy. It was probably what was stressing him out to the point he was hearing voices. That was when this had all started: when he brought the clay pipe home. He shook his head. He wasn't superstitious like that. He wasn't even going to continue with that train of thought. Instead, Corey opened his phone and fiddled with it, ordering a kebab through a fast food app. When he dropped it back on the coffee table, it landed with a clatter.

He closed his eyes and only woke up when the delivery driver was buzzing through insistently to be let up with the food. As he let the driver up, he wondered why he was so exhausted.

 _Take a break_.

This time, he couldn’t tell if the voice he heard was his own thoughts or not.


End file.
